Pathan suspension: Why the MIM shouldn't expect much sympathy from the Muslim community

Many are annoyed that party
leader Asaduddin Owaisi used a speech by RSS chief Bhagwat out of
context to enmesh Muslims in the debate on nationalism.

It is fitting
that the first time Waris Pathan made news after being elected to the
Maharashtra Assembly, was for his refusal to chant “Bharat Mata ki Jai”. The
position the Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen legislator took is characteristic of
what his party stands for – a defiant assertion of exclusive Muslim
identity. On Wednesday, Pathan was suspended
from the Assembly
for dismissing demands from fellow legislators that he should hail India
as a mother goddess, an act some Muslims believe violates their
religion's precepts of monotheism.
Pathan was one of
two MIM candidates who were elected during the 2014 Maharashtra Assembly
elections. He was voted in by Muslims in Mumbai’s Byculla to punish the
Congress for taking them for granted. At the time, Muslims also wanted
to give a chance to the fiery Owaisi brothers – Asaduddin, a member of
Parliament from Hyderabad,
and Akbaruddin, a legislator from Telangana – who head the party. But
since his election, Pathan has done nothing for his voters.
Cynical Muslims
who refused to come under the spell of the Owaisi brothers’ oratory had
predicted the MIM’s non-performance during the Assembly election campaign
itself.Déjà vu for
Muslims
Ahead of
elections in Maharashtra in October 2014, Asaduddin and Akbaruddin Owaisi
declared themselves to be the saviours of the Muslim community who would
provide the aggressive leadership needed to counter the newly elected Hindutva
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his mentors, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party were vilified as having failed
to represent Muslims, their secularism a sham.
On Wednesday,
Congress and Nationalist Congress Party legislators lived up to this description when they joined the
Shiv Sena and BJP in demanding Pathan’s suspension from the Assembly for
refusing to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai”.
This episode may have given Muslims a sense of déjà vu as they
are being asked to prove their patriotism yet again. This has been happening far too frequently
since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, said Afsar Usmani of the
Movement for Peace and Justice. And yet again, the Congress, the professed
defender of secularism, has betrayed the community to retain any section of the Hindu vote
bank it may have left.
Pathan’s
suspension was a rare, but ugly display of Hindutva power in a
representative
institution that is supposed to uphold the Constitution. But while there
is
sympathy for him for being wronged as an MLA, a representative of
Muslims and
as a citizen, there’s nothing but anger against his party chief who made
a non-issue into an issue. These are words being used across the board
to
describe Asaduddin Owaisi’s speech in Latur on Sunday, when the MIM
leader waded into a
controversy that had, so far, nothing do with Muslims.
The timing of
Owaisi’s response to a statement by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan
Bhagwat is significant. On March 2, Bhagwat said it was time
to tell students to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai” to inculcate nationalism in them.
Eleven days later, Owaisi made his by now famous speech: “I will not say
‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ even if a knife were held to my throat."
But Bhagwat had
not made any religious references in his speech at all: he was referring to
students within the context of the Jawaharlal Nehru University controversy, and not
to Muslims. That, said Muslims, gave the game away.Changing the
narrative
In the first week
of March, JNU’s students, led by the charismatic Communist Party of
India’s
Kanhaiya Kumar, were giving it back to the RSS like few had before. “For
the first time, questions were being raised on basic issues
which no political party had raised,” said Inquilab editor
Shahid Latif, who has given front page space in Mumbai’s leading Urdu
daily to
the controversies about JNU, the Dalit scholar Rohit Vemula who
committed suicide at Hyderabad University in January, and before that,
to the strike by
students at the Film and Television Institute of India.
Said
Latif: “They were being
raised beautifully and confidently by a student whose speech was watched
internationally. His [Kanhaiya Kumar's] speech changed the atmosphere
in the country. This wasn’t your
run-of-the-mill secular vs communal speech. From nationalism to poverty,
he
forced us to confront every fundamental problem. It was important for
Muslims
to be part of this movement, this ray of hope.’’
And they were.
From religious scholars to businessmen, almost every Muslim this reporter spoke
to ascribed Asaduddin Owaisi’s speech to what they called a "setting" or arrangement with
the BJP, to divert attention from the challenge thrown to the ruling party by
students from Hyderabad to Delhi to Allahabad, in order to narrow down the
national discussion to the issue of Hindu-Muslim confrontation again.
“Was there any
pressure on Owaisi to say Bharat Mata ki Jai?” asked Afsar Usmani. “Why
couldn’t he have ignored Bhagwat’s remarks? Bhagwat wasn’t saying anything
new.”
Ever since the
MIM fielded candidates for Maharashtra’s Assembly election, many Muslims have
accused Asaduddin Owaisi of playing the BJP’s game. They say Owaisi is doing
all he can to weaken those fighting against the saffron party. They are
delighted that his party was sent packing during last year’s Bihar’s Assembly
elections, where he put up candidates despite the fight being a crucial battle between the BJP and the Nitish-Lalu combine.
Till now, it
wasn’t obvious that this allegation was true. The ambition of Asaduddin Owaisi
is to be the sole spokesperson of the Muslims, to wipe out all parties that
have claimed the allegiance of Muslim voters – be it the Congress and
Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra, the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh
and Maharashtra, or the Lalu-Nitish combine in Bihar.
The moment the MIM
puts up candidates, it automatically splits the Muslim vote. That by itself is
no evidence of the Owaisis playing the BJP game. Any party that tries to
provide an alternative to the Congress could be said to be helping the BJP
because it would cause a split in the anti-BJP vote. Arvind Kejriwal did this
in the last Lok Sabha elections – Muslims flocked to his AAP in
droves even though he did not appeal to them to vote for him as a community.
But Asaduddin
Owaisi’s strategy is the opposite. He appeals to Muslims as Muslims. His politics
is as much about Muslim identity and creating a Muslim vote bank as the
politics of the RSS is about creating a Hindu vote bank. They mirror each other
and, indeed, feed on each other’s rhetoric.
This time
however, the allegation that Owaisi played the BJP’s game has substance
to it.
In the entire debate on nationalism that has seized the country,
Muslims, or
any other minority, have had no need to intervene as a community. It has
been a battle of secular Indians vs Hindu nationalists. As
activist Feroze Mithiborewala pointed out, even the loudmouth Samajwadi
Party
leader Azam Khan from Uttar Pradesh has kept quiet.
With his
aggressive statement, Owaisi turned the nationalism debate into one of Hindu
nationalists vs anti-national Muslims. The BJP will reap the benefits of this
in the upcoming Assembly elections in several states.
But the dangers
to ordinary Muslims are more. Will Muslim students now be cornered in
universities and made to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, a slogan that started as a
patriotic cry during the freedom struggle, but that the RSS converted into a
religious one?
The silver lining
to this entire episode is that the demonstration by the MIM in support of Waris
Pathan drew barely 200 party members – this in the party’s heartland of
Nagpada. As Aslam Ghazi, spokesperson of the Jamaat-e-Islami said, “The MIM is
digging its own grave.”

Map of L K Advani's Rath Yatra of 1990

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